cath draft.docx

8/10/2019 Cath DRAFT.docx

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In his article Knowing How without Knowing That Yuri Cath wishes to

critique the primary positions in the debate over the relationship between

knowing how and knowing that. He wants to resist, on one side, the

intellectualists who claim that knowing-how can be reduced to some propositional

knowledge that something is the case. Equally though, Cath also wants to reject

the variety of accounts in the tradition of Gilbert Ryle that in various ways

construe knowing-how as the more basic kind of knowledge. Against these two,

Cath ends by proposing a third alternative that construes knowing-how as a

seeming relation. In this paper, I will attempt to spell out in more detail how tounderstand the seeming relation Cath proposes. I will also consider the

criticisms of Caths position from J. Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard, who

advocate for understanding knowing-how as a particular kind of cognitive

achievement. These two respective positions present knowing-how as either, as

Cath argues, a very minimal and tacit form of knowledge, or, as Carter and

Pritchard argue, as a rather robust and demanding kind of cognitive

achievement.

Intellectualists here represented by Jason Stanley and Timothy

Williamson (Stanley and Williamson 2001) claim that knowing-how ascriptions

are true just in cases where, for some subject S and some act , there is some

way w to and S knows-that w is a way to . In other words, a subject must

assent to a proposition that a certain way is how one might perform a given act.

For instance, one knows how to ride a bicycle just in cases where one knows that

a particular way of operating a bicycle is how one is able to competently ride a


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bicycle. This account of knowing-how is intended to avoid ascribing knowledge-

how in two kinds of scenarios. The first kind is one where a person is able to

perform an action correctly but either does not understand what she was doing

during the performance. The intellectualists think that it is intuitive to deny

knowing-how in cases where an agent luckily stumbles on the correct

performance without grasping why or how that performance was correct. The

second kind of case is one where an expert in a particular action becomes

disabled such that she is unable to perform the action she previously did

expertly. Here, the intellectualists want to say that it seems intuitive that we canascribe know-how to the disabled expert even though she is unable to perform

the particular action in question (Stanley and Williamson 2001, 416). The reason

they can attribute knowing-how to the latter case and not the former is that the

disabled expert is aware of the way in which the action can be competently

performed. More precisely she believes the proposition that there is a way to

perform said action.

Yuri Cath critiques this position by providing a case where intuitively a

subject knows how to perform a particular action but lacks the sort of

propositional knowledge the intellectualist think is necessary for knowing-how.

He gives the case of the person, Charlie, who finds a manual with correct

instructions on how to install a light bulb. Charlie grasps the instructions perfectly

and successfully knows-how to install a light bulb. However, the author of this

manual was malicious and intentionally mis-described how to perform the stated

task. A computer glitch at the printing company, however, caused the authors


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false instructions to be replaced with correct instructions only in the copy that

Charlie consulted. The import of this case is that while it seems the Charlie

knows-how to screw in a light bulb, his knowledge-that the instructions in the

manual are the way to install a light bulb is undermined since they were

accidentally true (Cath 2011, 117). Thus, Cath argues, Charlie seems to be an

instance where one can have knowledge-how without the attendant propositional

knowledge the intellectualist think is necessary.

Cath finds himself in agreement with other critics of the intellectualist

account, namely the Rylean and neo-Ryleans. Figures in this camp understandknowing-how either in terms of possessing a complex set of dispositions or in

terms of the ability to perform said action. Yet he resists the Rylean-inspired

class of positions because of cases like what he terms the salchow case

illustrate that one can have the ability to without knowing how to . An ice

skater, Irina, has a mistaken conception that to perform a salchow is to take off

on the outside edge of her skate and land on the inside edge, when in fact the

move is correctly performed in the opposite order. However, Irina has a

neurological disorder that causes her to perform the move correctly in spite of her

mistaken belief about the way to perform it (Cath 2011, 129). The lesson drawn

from this case is disputable, but Cath takes the meaning to be that since the ice

skaters intention and what she thinks she is doing when are not causally related

to her successful performance, we cannot truly say that she knows-how to

perform a salchow. He takes both this salchow case and the disabled expert

raised by the intellectualists as convincing counterexamples to the Rylean


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inspired positions, as they illustrate that successful performance is neither

necessary nor sufficient for knowing-how (Cath 2011, 132).

Having found both the intellectualist and the Rylean accounts of

knowing-how inadequate, Cath ends his article by briefly sketching out a possible

third alternative he terms the Seeming analysis . On this account, S knows how

to just in case there is some way w that seems to S like a way to . Caths

proposal is that the seeming relation is not a belief relation, thus distinguishing it

from the intellectualist requirement that there be a belief that some w is a way to

. Cath takes this account of knowing how to be superior because it canaccommodate both the intuitions of lucky light bulb and salchow cases, where

what seems to be a way to perform an action is either accidentally true or false

(Cath 2011, 134).

The seeming relations Cath provides is only briefly sketched, so it bears

exploring the sources he draws on to fully understand the proposal. In a footnote

to this passage, he specifies that his seeming account understands the relevant

seemings as nonperceptual, nonoccurrent states wherein there is a disposition

that some w seems like a way to ( Cath 2011, 133 note 19). He mentions that

his account parallels David Hunters account (Hunter 1998) of the relationship

between linguistic understanding and dispositions to understand. Hunter argues

that while a subjects linguistic faculties and he r dispositions to understand can

be understood as states of belief, that does not entail that the occurrent states of

understanding are likewise states of beliefs (Hunter 1998, 565). On the same

analogy, Cath wants to say that


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Cath proposal here is quite odd on at this point. On the one hand while he

wants to distinguish the seeming relation as a state where For S it seems to be

that p from the state where S believes that p, he notes that this distinction is

consistent with seeming consisting in an inclination or disposition to believe (Cath

2011, 133 note 18). Yet he also draws on George Bealers account of intellectual

seemings that are defeasible, such that the Mller-Lyer figure can seem to be

lines of two different lengths even if one knows that they are (Bealer 1993). This

allows him to accommodate cases where

In a way, Caths account can be seen as a revival of the understanding ofknowledge-how as a form of tacit knowledge. Jerry Fodor presented a seed of

this view based on the findings of cognitive psychology that much of the causes

our behavior and responses to stimuli are not reportable or easily accessed from

the subject perspective. While the anti-intellectualists would take this as a

decisive rejection of the intellectualist position, Fodor points out that there could

be latent forms of knowing operative of which the subject is unaware (Fodor

1968, 631). The intellectualist position, Fodor thinks, does not require that the

knowledge be articulable or even directly available, as this would conflate

knowing how to perform a task with giving an account or explanation of

performing that task (Fodor 1968, 634). Instead, the intellectualist is minimally

committed to saying that when an agent acts she is acting according to some

rule, even if it is latent or tacit for her (Fodor 1968, 636). If there is a set S of

tasks which are constitutive of performing some and a sufficient answer to the


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question How does one ? then S constitutes the relevant agent s tacit

knowledge-how (Fodor 1968, 638). In a similar vein, Cath seems to

Yet there are theoretical costs to construing knowing-how as a seeming

relationship. One such cost is that knowing-how would no longer be something

plausibly creditable to the agent in question. The focus on knowing-how as an

achievement cuts across the intellectualist/anti-intellectualist distinction. Julia

Annas, for instance, holds a kind of intellectualist position that the rational

achievement of agents is not solely in successful performances, but rather in an

agents fact -oriented states (Annas 2001, 244). Likewise, John Bengson andMarc Moffet take the cognitive achievement element of knowing-how as one of

the central explanada of their nonpropositional intellectualism (Bengson and

Moffett 2011, 161). The neo-Rylean anti-intellectualist focus on knowing-how as

an ability to reason appropriately in the relevant circumstances that epistemic

agents exercise means that they are credited if they exercise that ability

(Hetherington 2006, 89).

Duncan Pritchard and J. Adam Carter in particular want to argue stridently

for knowing-how as essentially involving some measure of cognitive achievement

(Carter and Pritchard 2013, 13). They take as their starting point by noting the

inadequacy of the neo-Rylean understanding of knowing-how in terms of

successful performance. The problem with this account is that the success of a

performance might have little to do with the competence or skill of the agent in

question. A person might make a lucky shot or some fluke event in the

environment might cause a successful performance. For example, suppose a


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skillful archer fires an arrow and one fluke gust of wind blows off course but

another gust of wind in the opposite direction blows it back on track so it

successfully hits the bullseye. Even if we stipulate that the archer skillfully fired

the bow, that manifested skill was not directly causally related to the successful

outcome because of the fluky counteracting gusts.

But if luck could undermine the achievement status of just a successful

performance, it seems that luck could also undermine the achievement of the

performances Carter and Prithcard specifically discuss, namely those

performances whose success are because of the ability of the performers inquestion. Here Carter and Pritchard want to make a distinction between two

different kinds of luck: intervening and environmental. Intervening luck is the

kind of luck that manifests itself between the skillful ability and the successful

outcome, as the gusts of wind intervened between the archers firing and the

arrow hitting the target (Carter and Pritchard 2013, 4). Carter and Pritchard

admit that intervening luck does undermine the achievement status of a

performance. But suppose that there is no intervening luck on an action but

some lucky aspect of the environment in which the performance takes place.

To give a variant on the archer case mentioned above, suppose that the archer

hits the bullseye at a moment when there were no gusts of wind to blow the

arrow off course. It is still true that the circumstances of this shot were lucky, as

fluky gusts could very easily have blow the arrow off course and made the

performance a failure.


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In cases like this, Carter and Pritchard want to claim that environmental

but non-intervening luck does not undermine achievement like intervening luck

does. Their reason is that the success of the performance is the direct causal

resul t of the agents ability, even though it was lucky in some sense (Carter and

Pritchard 2013, 4). Carter and Pritchard note that while environmental luck does

not undermine knowledge-how achievements, the same is not true of knowledge-

that. Consider the standard case of the real barn in fake barn country. Even if

one is happens to be

Carter and Pritchard even use a variant of Caths lucky light bulb case to illustrate their point about how environmental luck does not eliminate knowing-

how. Suppose that Charlie consulted a bookshelf full of various manuals for how

to screw in a light bulb. He chooses one that happens to provide correct

instructions, allowing him to successfully learn how to screw in a light bulb. As it

turns out however, all of the other manuals on that shelf were the product of

malicious authors who intentionally misdescribed how to install a light bulb. By

chance, though, Charlie happened to select the one book that gave genuine,

accurate instructions. Does

How then

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